The most important contribution of recent scholarship to the understanding of the Amores is the study of Ovid’s treatment of the genre and of his literary predecessors. The terms parody, travesty, and reductio ad absurdum are not new, but they need some further definition or amplification. What is not in doubt is that the Amores are basically a light-hearted reworking of the genre. They are not the product of personal emotion, nor do they have any immediate relationship to the life of the poet; and many of the questions which in the past engaged the student of love-elegy (such as morality, sincerity, autobiography) are thus unimportant or irrelevant. Some scholars still insist that Corinna was a real person; but in a parody this is unlikely, and some of Ovid’s own references (Am. 2. 17. 29 f., Ars. 3. 538) seem to cast doubt on her existence.

The question of authenticity still exercises scholars; one recent critic has even reduced the number of genuine Heroides to ten (namely 1—7, 10, 11, and 15). The poems chiefly under suspicion are 9 (Deianira), 15 (Sappho), and 16—21 (the double letters). The most cogent arguments against 9 and 16—21 are the metrical ones, but for the double letters these diminish with the later dating. The Sappho letter (15) has been transmitted separately from the rest of the Heroides; it may be that it was deliberately omitted because of its anomalous (non-mythological) subject-matter when the single and double letters were united into one collection, but there are still some linguistic oddities which need explaining. For the purpose of this discussion I have assumed that all twenty-one of the Heroides are genuine; I have also chosen to discuss the work as a single collection rather than as two separate ones.

If the Heroides are an adaptation of the elegiac tradition to the epistolary form, then the Ars and Remedia are an adaptation to the didactic, with the crucial difference that, unlike the poetic epistle, the didactic poem had a clearly defined tradition and (in Virgil) a distinguished recent practitioner. The Hesiodic tradition had been enlarged by the Alexandrians to include the learned scientific, and had more recently been debased by the inclusion of the trivial (Tr. 2. 471 ff.), and it is important to see where Ovid stands. Superficially, the Ars Amatoria is on a par with practical poems like that of Ovid’s contemporary Grattius on hunting, and the Remedia Amoris has affinities with medical works like Macer’s on the cures for snake-bites; but the use of the didactic form for such an untraditional subject as love creates ‘a pleasing atmosphere of burlesque’.

The Fasti has often been regarded as one of Ovid’s less successful works; it has also been one of the more neglected, even during the present revival of interest in Ovid. There are diminishing returns to be gained from the re-editing of the text, from the investigation of Ovid’s sources, and from the study of the chronology of the work; and it is doubtful whether significant progress has been made in these fields in the last twenty years. There has been progress in our understanding of Roman religion and of the calendar, but this has not revealed any unsuspected insights or deficiencies on Ovid’s part. It is on the literary side of the Fasti that the most interesting work is to be done.

In contrast to the comparative neglect of the Fasti, the Metamorphoses has been the subject of several important books and monographs in the last two decades. The most influential of these has been Otis’s book Ovid as an Epic Poet, which has focused attention on three aspects of the work, its relation to epic, its structure, and its attitude to Augustus.

The letters from exile have been the least appreciated and most heavily criticized of Ovid’s works. In the past scholars found interest in details of biography, prosopography, chronology, and ethnography; but in general they were very ready to accept Ovid’s own view of the poetry as monotonous, repetitious, and of inferior quality (Pont. 1. 5, 3. 9), and to add their own condemnation of the servile flattery used by the poet in his efforts to secure a better fate. More recently Ovid’s attitude to Augustus has been re-examined to suggest considerable independence of spirit, and a careful examination of individual elegies has revealed a richer poetic quality than had generally been suspected.